Gertinj said in a light but quelling tone. “Which is why you had me carry this heavy box of documents over to her as if my old bones don’t creak, too.”
She moved between Josiane and Shanti, dropping the box on the table and then waving away the cloud of dust. “Sorry.”
“Humph,” Josiane said, and stalked away.
Gertinj waited until she’d left and then turned to Shanti with a soft smile. “Josiane is treating you unfairly.”
Shanti kept the barbed reply on the tip of her tongue to herself and smiled up at Gertinj. “I noticed.”
The older women reached out as if to touch Shanti, then looked at her dusty gloves and gave her a warm smile instead. “Try not to take it personally.”
Shanti didn’t know how else she was supposed to take it, but she smiled and nodded.
Gertinj sighed.
“Here we have a saying because of the land mines. ‘Her feet are gone, but she still searches for her socks when it’s cold.’” Gertinj pressed her lips together ruefully. “Sometimes memories of the past make people behave strangely today. Josiane is old enough to have many memories, my queen.”
Gertinj left with a wave, returning to the group who had worked together for years and mostly politely avoided Shanti. It seemed that everyone had received the memo that she would fail and be gone soon, and no one wanted to get attached.
She picked up her phone, tapped out a message to Nya and Portia saying she had an important royal matter to attend to but would be back later, and then queued up her favorite comprehensive world news podcast and popped in her earbuds. She was getting ready to dig into the box when a shadow fell over her.
She kept her gaze resolutely down, not wanting to deal with whatever issue Josiane had come up with to bother her about now. Being able to smile serenely in the face of people trying to provoke you was a queenly skill that had taken years to develop, but Josiane was treading close to the waters just outside the Cape of Fuck Off.
The shadow didn’t move. And, now that she glanced at it, unless Josiane’s shadow reflected the truly large and intimidating nature of her personality and not her actual short, plump frame, this wasn’t her. It looked more like . . .
Shanti just reined in her instinctive reaction, which was to jump up out of her seat. Instead, she smoothly removed her gloves, then her earphones, and turned her head up and to the left in a graceful arc.
Her husband stood over her in his royal robe, the exposed skin of his arms and shoulders glistening in the sunlight filtering in through the library’s windows. A pair of slim rectangular glasses were perched on his nose, making him look like a stern professor who’d come to chastise her archiving methods before bending her over a table and—
“H-hello, Husband,” she said. Dammit, why had her voice trembled like that? She might as well have announced that she was having inappropriate archive fantasies.
“Hello.” He was stiff. Tense. Glaring down at her. It seemed she was the only one who remembered what had happened the night before.
“Are you angry?” There was no deference in her tone. If he wanted to tread water just outside her good graces with Josiane, she wasn’t going to indulge him.
“I am not angry,” he said, though his expression was enough to make a fainting goat keel over. Shanti was of hardier stock.
“You look angry,” she said.
“I am not. I was on my way to give my speech and needed something from the library. That is all.”
Oh. So he hadn’t come to see her. At least he’d stopped to give her an angry hello instead of ignoring her as he had all the other times he’d passed through the library while she worked.
“Did you need to look something up in reference to the speech?” Shanti doubted that, since the speeches were most definitely written by Musoke, who only referenced the Book of Egomania in his works.
“No,” Sanyu said. “I found what I need and I will go to give my speech soon.”
Sanyu was speaking strangely, as if he’d forgotten the contractions section of his English grammar book.
“What did you need?”
He reached toward her and slid a dusty old paperclip across the table toward him, then picked it up between thumb and forefinger and held it up. “This.”
“Well, okay then,” she said, and moved to slip her earbud back in. His shadow turned and moved away